About New York; A Shrine Is Born In the Incubator Of the 'Wretched'

By MARTIN GOTTLIEB

Published: September 1, 1990

To the side of a blacktop city park at First Avenue and East First Street, a bronze plaque affixed to a fiberglass rock has been drawing a varied stream of pilgrims all summer.

It leads Arnold Howard Freeman, widely known as Howard, who sells used copies of quality books from an adjacent armchair, to marvel: ''At all times, 24 hours a day, they come here, couples, singles, too, and they read, mostly in silence. The other day someone sat down in front of it in the lotus position for about three hours and copied. Yesterday there were people here at 2 A.M.''

On the plaque is ''The Black Sheep,'' a poem by the performance artist Karen Finley. It opens with a conversation between two veteran funeralgoers in the age of AIDS, one swearing never to attend another ''death party'' for someone he didn't know.

Cause-cause-cause I feel I feel so

sad cause I never knew their life -

and now I only know their death.

The poem moves to reflections on the multitudes in ''the black sheep family'':

There's always one in every family

Even when we're surrounded by bodies

we're always alone.

The poem continues later:

That's our life. That's our story.

Usually we're outcasts, outsiders

in our own family.

Don't worry - get used to it.

The sentiments most pointedly encompass gay people, women, people with AIDS, bohemians and the sorts of constitutional contrarians who make up the parade on the bustling little strip that Howard calls the boulevard.

But given its location, ''The Black Sheep'' addresses and includes much more. The corner is at the heart of the city's great immigrant incubator, the Lower East Side.

Homeless men sell whatevers on either side of the sculpture.

Asian-American teen-agers play handball on courts behind it. Across First Avenue is a homeless encampment occupied mostly by African-Americans in a stripped-down park named for I. L. Peretz, often called the father of Yiddish literature and a champion of the oppressed Jews of turn-of-the-century Poland.

Ms. Finley is best known for her performance work, including ''We Keep Our Victims Ready,'' which concludes with ''The Black Sheep.'' The work has moved audiences with its at times shrieking expression of women's abnegation and abuse; its railing against a power structure, white, male and heterosexual, that Ms. Finley argues has closed itself to the pain of those outside it, and its final declaration of redemption and renewal in the arms of each other for the neglected and the hurt.

To a broader public, however, it is best known through the clumsy debate over the National Endowment of the Arts, which has rejected Ms. Finley's latest grant proposal. Ms. Finley's opponents portray the piece as little more than a contrivance summed up by her stripping to her underpants and smearing herself with chocolate. That characterization can only strike those who have seen the performance as wrongheaded and pernicious.

Ms. Finley's defenders have pointed to the power and morality of her work and - in no small part through the ways in which she uses her body - to its startling ability to voice the pain and longing of society's outsiders.

As its reception on First Avenue points out, Ms. Finley's work accomplishes something else. It strikes a particular and resonant chord in a city whose proudest heritage is the accommodation, however painful, of waves of ''wretched refuse,'' tainted by suspect ethnicity, politics, sexuality or life style.

''People stand here in the heat and read this thing - and that's pretty good for New York,'' Alun Uluc said recently near ''The Black Sheep,'' where she paused with her 9-month-old daughter, Emel. ''Basically every black sheep in every state and even Europe comes here and they all blend in - that's what the East Village is about.''

So much so that Reggie Joseph, an unemployed carpenter, sells rice paper rubbings of the poem for $5 at a good clip. Juan Garcia, who had come downtown from East Harlem to visit a friend, said he particularly liked ''The Black Sheep'' passage that reads:

We always speak our mind

appreciate differences in culture

believe in sexual preferences

believe in no racism, no sexism, no religionism.

Mr. Garcia was wearing a bandage across his nose as a result of a mugging in Newark.

The Black Sheep installation cost $5,000 and is sponsored by Creative Time, which presents art in public places throughout the city. It will remain at the site until October.